How do I Archive My data?

To create an archive of your data, you need to create two custom reports.

Under custom reporting, create a new prospect report and select all prospects, then add all available columns to your report and click "generate". If the report looks correct, use the "CSV" button to export it to a file that you can open in excel or import into other programs.

Then do the same with a new family report (some of the columns are redundant, but you can export them all anyway).

The family data will include their balance information, but if you want specific payment and/or enrollment information, you might want to create a payment report or statements for all your families and use the PDF button which will let you save the reports to refer to later.

YourVirtuoso and Kindermusik Q & A

The Bottom Line
The original agreement between Kindermusik and SimplySignUp expires in July, but YourVirtuoso will continue to be available, supported and enhanced. The team at SimplySignUp (SSU) is happy to be taking over full responsibility for supporting the service which they defined, designed, and manage today.

Who is SSU?
SSU was formed in 2004 by Gerry Cobley and a Raleigh NC based software design company to address the need for a web-based application serving music studios, dance studios, etc.
Gerry's 15 years administering Julia's large (top 1% Maestro) Kindermusik studio provided the detailed knowledge which, along with with his MBA, business experience with Gartner and his partners' business application and web design expertise combined to create the critical mass needed to develop YourVirtuoso.
SSU has no other investors, and developed YV without any outside funding (not even from KI).

Why is the Agreement Expiring?
SSU and KI hoped that YourVirtuoso would eventually benefit virtually all Kindermusik educators. For this reason, KI elected to make it mandatory for new licensees. What we (SSU) have learned is that there are a very large number of educators who have such small enrollment (10 or 20 students) and no burning desire to grow, that even the $14.95 and the couple of hours to set YV up were beyond their needs. KI plans to address this with their new Class locator based system, and while we provided a proposal to have this interwork with YV and use existing YV capabilities, KI have elected to build it on their own.

What is changing in July?
As a subscriber to YV, very little will change about the service itself. The service has always been owned and managed by SimplySignUp (SSU) and in July the only significant change we expect will be that SSU will take over customer support from KI. The end-user license agreement you accepted when you registered for YV was between you and SSU and is not affected (though we may clarify your full ownership of your data, and ask you to affirm that you are a licensed KM educator who can use the KI logos in your website).

What About the Future of YV?
From the SSU perspective, we are a small but viable corporation focussed on providing a fully integrated, fully featured suite of studio administration and internet marketing tools. This remains our vision, and we have no intention to pull the plug on YourVirtuoso.
We have no plans to increase the subscription price for YV, including YV 2.0 at this time.
KI has no desire to deny you access to KI curriculum information, and we will put a process in place to promptly update curriculum information when necessary.

We will, however, be free to add features based on your needs, not constrained by KI's priorities, and we will putting a process in place to capture your priorities.
We cannot speak to the specifics of which YV features will and wont be duplicated by KI on Kindermusik.com, but our expectation is that educators with significant enrollment, non- Kindermusik curricula, reporting and tracking needs, or concerns over KI ownership of their customer data will find YV the best, if not the only, option. Only time will tell, so we recommend you wait and see.


Should I Let Kindermusik Have an Archive of my Data?
Here are a few facts and one opinion for you to consider:

1. SSU uses a professional, secure hosting company and data is backed up by us every 30 minutes, and transferred to tapes for offsite storage every day.
   
2. In YV 2.0 you can create complete reports for customers and prospects, and export those to "CSV" files which can be stored on your computer and read by excel, word etc.
   
3. SSU has not been informed of how the data would be used by Kindermusik
   

... and the opinion... Your customer list is the crown jewel of your business. Be very careful how you share it. My advice is not to share it at all - whenever KI sends an email (like Tune In) to your prospects, selling old DRMY inventory for example, with no mention of kindermusik classes, it devalues the Kindermusik brand from the educational values you have spent years promoting. ...end of opinion...

SSU is committed to supporting you, and protecting your valuable customer data.

Customers Who Don't Need Materials

For your own custom curricula, and (very rarely) for Kindermusik curricula you sometimes have students who don't need materials (enroll very late in session for example). You can certainly just  modify the charges to $0, but the materials package will still be counted on your "Materials Needed" report.

The best way to handle this is to add a new materials package to the units/curricula you use. Add it in curriculum setup before you create the classes. You can call it "Other" or "None Required", but it will be shown on the public website as a materials option, so you may want to be careful how you describe it. I have put something like "Please contact us if you have unique needs for materials".

Once this is in place, when you have a student who does not get any of the standard packages, you can just "modify" the default materials in their AR page and select this package in the drop down selector, making appropriate notes or pricing changes at the same time. This will take them out of the counts used in your materials report (and show them under "Other").

Remember, for Kindermusik Curricula you are bound by your licensing agreement, so one of the standard materials packages is almost always required...

Gerry

ABC on YourVirtuoso

We are often asked about ABC Music & Me, and how to handle it in YV. There are many ways to approach it, and I would encourage comments on this blog with any of your creative ideas.
First of all, why can it be a problem? Here are a few important differences from the other KI curricula for which YV is currently optimised. They all stem from the fact that ABC is structured in 4 week units:

1. Signing up continuing students every month can be a burden
2. There is no set session start and end if you run an ongoing program where students join and drop at will
3. Long sessions with multiple months show the entire cost, and may cause "sticker shock"
4. Classes at Daycares are usually restricted to children attending the daycare

We have some plans to change the way sessions and pricing are handled to make this much simpler, but these will not be available until after YourVirtuoso 2.0, so here is one option we came up with to handle a daycare ABC program with rolling monthly enrollment:

1. Set up a new session for the classes starting when your program starts and ending at some logical point in the distant future such as the end of the school year. DO NOT ACTIVATE this session so that will not appear on your website.
2. Set up the ABC classes in this session picking all the units that you will teach over this extended period. If you charge $50 per month, split as $15 materials and $35 tuition, set the materials packages to $15 incl tax (if you do it in the curriculum, you wont have to do it for each class you add), and set the tuition to be $35 * the number of units you will teach over this period (e.g if your session was 9 months long, set the tuition to $315). Set up a pricing plan to take $50 deposit and spread the balance over the session in monthly payments. Test enroll someone to check that it sets the monthly fees to $50, and adjust dates to make it work if not. You can activate these classes (not the session).
3. In your currently active session (eg Fall 07) set up an ABC class for the unit you are about to start with the appropriate start and end dates etc. Price it at $35, materials $15. Activate it and it will appear online for parents to register in. Market to/through the daycare asking parents to sign up online for this class and store their credit cards, and let them know they will stay enrolled until they advise you they want to drop.
4. When the enrollment period for this months class is over, mark it completed, remove the students from this class (creating a credit) and add them to the ongoing class. Make a payment to apply their $50 credit to the first (deposit) on the ongoing class.
5. You now have these students all set for the rest of the year. If they drop out, modify their tuition (was $315) to what they actually took, and modify the materials that they will not be getting to $0 (ideally set up a dummy "no materials" package for this curriculum so your materials report counts them correctly)
6. For new students, add a class(es) in your current session every month for the current unit, and set the class size to be the spaces you have left. At the end of the enrollment period, move them to the ongoing class as before, but adjust tuition and materials to reflect their late start in the session.

As I said, we are working on simplifying this process! In the mean time do you have a better way of handling it anyone?

Gerry

Online Survey Instructions

After Michael encouraged us all to survey our "Defectors" (did not re-enroll) I thought it would be worth stepping through this process, explaining how to do it using YV.

The Surveymonkey piece is not related to YV, but for completeness, I have documented the whole process:

• Sign up for free basic surveymonkey account at www.Surveymonkey.com

• Create new survey
• edit first page and put description like:

"We noticed that you did not re-enroll for classes at Kindermusik... this Fall, and would appreciate just a few moments of your time to help us understand why.
The full 7 years of Kindermusik curricula, followed by instrument study, are a wonderful gift we would love to help you give your child, so your feedback is of particular interest to us in improving our offerings.

Thanks,

Miss ...."

• Add question:
  

Type: Rating Scale
Text: How Satisfied were you with your Kindermusik experience at KinderVillage?
Row Choices:
Curriculum
Teacher
Schedule
Price

Columns: 10 Ratings
1 Disappointed
5 Neutral
10 Thrilled

• Add A Question:
  

Type: Single Textbox
Text: What was the Primary reason you decided not to re-enroll?
Require an answer
Set Size to 30 characters

• Add A Question:
  

Type: Comment/Essay Box
Text: Please Provide More Detail on satisfactions and/or disappointments:

• Add A Question:
  

Type: Rating Scale
Text: Based on your experience at KinderVillage, how likely would you be to enthusiastically recommend KinderVillage to a friend?
Row Choice:
How likely would you be to enthusiastically recommend KinderVillage to a friend?

Columns: 10 Ratings
1 Not at all likely
4 Somewhat unlikely
7 Somewhat likely
10 Extremely likely

• Add A Question:
  

Type: Comment/Essay Box
Text: Is there one thing that KinderVillage could have done to keep you and your child as customers?

• Preview your survey and carefully proof read it.
  
• go to "Collect Responses"
  
• Use the default "Create a link for email..."
  
• Name the link: e.g. "Re-Enrollment Survey"
  
• Select and copy the webpage link ( )
  

• Now Login to YourVirtuoso
  

Marketing
Mailings

• Add a Mailing: Type email; name and schedule it
  

Pick the recipients:
1 Select by enrollment - Families with child enrolled in Spring 07
2 Select by enrollment - Families with child NOT enrolled in Fall 07

• Click "Next" and create mailing content
  
• Type in the body of your email, position the cursor where you want the link to the survey to be and click the <> tool to get to html mode and paste the link from surveymonkey (on a Mac, just paste it, no need for <>)
  
• Click OK and check to see that the text and link are correct.
  

If all is OK, Save the mailing and you are all set. Just wait a day or two and go back to surveymonkey to analyze the results.

You can obviously create other surveys, and use different mailing selectors to pick who to invite...

Enjoy,

Gerry

Family Login Problems

There are a few problems that come up with families that cannot access their accounts. It is worth understanding these, as there are some simple ways to avoid many of them.

First off, YV uses the email address as the unique identifier for a family account. Names are not unique, and email works well, as it provides a secure way to validate an account. 

Here are a couple of possible problems:

1. Family tries to create an account but gets an error because the email is "in use". This is usually when you have already entered them as an admin. If you gave them a password, they can retrieve it with the forgotten password link (note that it takes a little while, and spam filters sometimes interfere, so if they are on the phone, you may want to go to their account and just give them a new temporary password.) 
2. If you did not give them a password (but did enter their email), they will be asked to contact you when they try to enroll, and you will need to give them one. The best policy is just to give a random password whenever you put an email in for a family.
3. Neither you nor the family can enter their email because it is "in use".  First, double check your families list. Maybe the other parent created an account under a different name etc. The definitive way to check is to use the "advanced search" link on the families list page and search for the email. If the email is not being used in your system, the family may have signed up with another educator who uses YourVirtuoso. We are going to remove this restriction so that a family can have multiple accounts with different educators, but for now there are two solutions: 1) Have the family use a different email address, or 2) If you know the other educator, and they no longer serve that family, ask them to archive the family.

A final note. These login issues sometimes result in duplicate families. There is an easy way, and a correct way, to handle this (as always). The easy way is to ensure the old account has $0 balance and archive it. This is fine moving forward, but you lose access to the family class history.

The right way is to recreate the duplicate family enrollment(s) under the old family; remove the duplicate family enrollment(s); make an adjustment to the duplicate family to get it to $0 balance and archive it; make the opposite adjustment to the old family and apply any credit to scheduled payments. This should take care of it. You may want to ask them which email address they prefer to use, and advise them what you have done of course, so they can log in to the old account which will now have all their history intact (except payment details which will by covered by the adjustment you made)

My Bio has too many characters

The bio in YourVirtuoso is displayed in a pop-up window for your customers, and really needs to be fairly brief to look good. There is unlimited space to put an extended bio on the "Our Studio" page which you can edit using Content/Inline Editor and then navigating to the "About Kindermusik" page and the "Our Studio" page.